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What kind of left for the 21st century? Democratic Centralism and broad left parties

Socialist Resistance steering comittee

January 2008 -- Since the beginning of the decade important steps have been
made in rebuilding the left internationally, following the working
class defeats of the ‘80s and ‘90s and the negative impact of the
collapse of the Soviet Union.

Starting with the demonstrations
against the World Trade Organisation conference in Seattle at the end
of 1999, an important global justice movement emerged, which fed
directly into the building of a massive anti-war movement that
internationally dwarfed the anti-Vietnam war movement in the 1960s.
These processes breathed fresh life into the left, as could be seen
already at the Florence European Social Movement in 2002 where the
presence of the Rifondazione Comunista and the tendencies of the far
left was everywhere. In addition, the massive rebirth of the left and
socialism in Latin America has fuelled these processes.

However unlike the regrowth and
redefinition of the left symbolised by the years 1956 and 1968, in the
first decade of the 21st century things were much more difficult
objectively, with the working class mainly on the defensive. Multiple
debates on orientation and strategy have started to sweep the
international left, leading to a reconfiguration of the socialist
movement in several countries.

Positive aspects of this process
include historic events in Venezuela and Bolivia (with all their
problems), the emergence of Die Linke – the Left party – in Germany,
the Left Bloc in Portugal and indeed new left formations in many
countries.

In other countries the left
redefinitions have been decidedly mixed. For example the Sinistra
Critica (Critical Left) went out of the Communist Refoundation in
Italy, over the fundamental question of the latter’s support for
Italian participation in the Afghanistan war and neoliveral domestic
policies. In Brazil a militant minority walked out of the Workers Party
(PT) to found the Socialism and Liberty Party (PSOL), over the central
question of the Lula government’s application of a neoliberal policy
which made a mockery of the name of the party. This splits, for sure,
represented a political clarification and an attempt to rescue and
defend principled class struggle politics. But the evolution of the
majority in both the PT and Communist Refoundation are of course
massive defeats for the left.

So, in many countries debates are
opening up about what kind of left we need in the 21st century. This is
of course normal; each successive stage of the international class
struggle, especially after world historic events of the type we have
seen after 25 years of neoliberalism, poses the issue of socialist
organisation anew. It is absurd to imagine that it is possible to take
off the shelf wholesale texts written in Russia in 1902 or even 1917,
and apply them in an unmediated way in 2007. Even less credible is the
idea of taking the form of revolutionary organisation and politics
appropriate for Minneapolis in 1934 [1]
and simply attempting to extrapolate it in a situation where
revolutionary politics has been transformed by central new issues (of
gender and the environment in particular); where the working class
itself has been transformed in terms of its cultural level,
geographical distribution and political and trade union organisation;
and where the experience of mass social movements and the balance sheet
of Stalinism (and social democracy) has radically reaffirmed the
centrality of self-organisation and democracy at the heart of the
revolutionary project.

As we shall discuss in more details
below, it is now obvious that the models of political organisation and
habits of engagement with the rest of the left, adopted by some
self-proclaimed Trotskyist organisations (like Gerry Healy’s SLL-WRP)
were strongly pressurised by third period Stalinism and organisational
methods and assumptions inherited from the Stalinised Comintern. No
section of British Trotskyism was entirely unaffected by this pressure.

Against this background the split in
Respect might not seem too unusual. But there is something special
about it, considered on an international level. While there were no
principled questions of politics involved (as there were in Italy and
Brazil), nevertheless the main revolutionary organisation involved, the
SWP, managed to alienate almost the totality of others forces within
the movement. This is a spectacularly unfavourable result for a
revolutionary organisation and one that cannot be explained by the myth
of an anti-socialist “witch-hunt”. Something much more fundamental in
politics is involved.

Revolutionary Socialism and ‘broad left parties’

As noted above, the experience of
building broad left parties internationally has been decidedly mixed;
in some cases they have slid to the right and ended up supporting
neoliberal governments. For some on the revolutionary left, what we
might call the ‘clean hands and spotless banner’ tendency, this shows
that attempts at political recomposition are a waste of time. Far
better to just build your organisation, sell your paper, hold your
meetings, criticise everyone else and maintain your own spotless
banner. But underlying this simplistic approach is actually a deeply
spontaneist conception of the revolutionary process. This generally
takes the form of the idea that “under the pressure of events”, and
after the revolutionary party has been “built”, the revolutionary party
will finally link up with big sections of the working class. With this
comforting idea under our belts we can be happy to be a very small (but
well organised) minority and be sanguine about the strength of the
right and indeed the far right.

In our view this simplistic “build the
party” option is no longer operable; indeed it is irresponsible because
it inevitably leaves the national political arena the exclusive terrain
of the right. In the era of neoliberalism, without a mass base for
revolutionary politics but with a huge base for militant opposition to
the right, it seems to us self-evident the left has to get together, to
organise its forces, to win new forces away from the social-liberal
centre left, to contest elections and to raise the voice of an
alternative in national politics. This is what has been so important
about Die Linke, the Left Bloc, the Danish Red-Green Alliance and many
others.

This was the importance of the Workers
Party in Brazil and the Communist Refoundation in Italy at their
height: that they articulated a significant national voice against
neoliberalism that would have been impossible for the small forces of
the revolutionary left.

More than that: the very existence of
these forces, at various stages, had an important impact on mass
mobilisations and struggles – as for example Communist Refoundation did
on mobilising the anti-war movement and the struggle against pension
reform in Italy. The existence of a mass political alternative raises
people’s horizons, remoralises them, brings socialism back onto
political agendas, erects an obstacle to the domination of political
discourses by different brands of neoliberalism and promotes the
struggle. It also acts as a clearing house of political ideas in which
the revolutionaries put their positions.

So with a broad left formation in
existence everyone is a winner – not! No broad left formation has been
problem free. For revolutionaries these are usually coalitions with
forces to their political right. They are generally centres of
permanent political debate and disagreement, and they pose major
questions of political functioning for revolutionary forces, especially
those used to a strong propaganda routine. They inevitably involve
compromises and difficult judgements about where to draw political
divides.

What an orientation towards political
regroupment of the left does not involve is a fetishisation of a
particular political structure, or the idea that broad left parties are
the new form of revolutionary party, or the notion that these parties
will necessarily last for decades. For us they are interim and
transitional forms of organisation (but see the qualification of this
below). Our goal remains that of building revolutionary parties. It’s
just that, as against the ‘clean hands and spotless banner’ tendency,
we have a major disagreement about what revolutionary parties, in the
21st century, will look like – and how to build them.

The functioning of revolutionaries in broad left parties

Broad left parties (or alliances) are
not united fronts around specific questions, but political blocs. For
them to develop and keep their unity, they have to function according
to basic democratic rules. However this cannot be reduced to the
simplistic notion that there are votes and the majority rules. This
leaves out of account the anomalies and anti-democratic practices which
the existence of organised revolutionary currents can give rise to if
they operate in a factional way. On this we would advance the following
general guidelines:

* Inside broad left formations there
has to be a real, autonomous political life in which people who are not
members of an organised current can have confidence that decisions are
not being made behind their backs in a disciplined caucus that will
impose its views – they have to be confident that their contribution
can affect political debates.

* This means that no revolutionary
current can have the ‘disciplined Phalanx’ concept of operation. Except
in the case of the degeneration of a broad left current (as in Brazil)
we are not doing entry work or fighting a bureaucratic leadership. This
means in most debates, most of the time, members of political currents
should have the right to express their own viewpoint irrespective of
the majority view in their own current. If this doesn’t happen the real
balance of opinion is obscured and democracy negated. Evidently this
shouldn’t be the case on decisive questions of the interest of the
working class and oppressed – like sending troops to Afghanistan. But
if there are differences on issues like that, then membership of a
revolutionary current is put in question. One can also imagine vital
strategic and sometimes important tactical questions on which a
democratic centralist organisation might want its members all to vote
the same way. But these should be exceptional circumstances and not the
norm. In practice, of course, on most questions most of the time
members of revolutionary tendencies would tend to have similar
positions.

* Revolutionary tendencies should avoid
like the plague attempts to use their organisational weight to impose
decisions against everyone else. That’s a disastrous mode of operation
in which democracy is a fake. If a revolutionary tendency can’t win its
opinions in open and democratic debate, unless it involves fundamental
questions of the interest of the working class and oppressed,
compromises and concessions have to be made. Democracy is a fake if a
revolutionary current says ‘debate is OK, and we’ll pack meetings to
ensure we win it’.

* Revolutionaries – individuals and
currents – have to demonstrate their commitment and loyalty to the
broad left formation of which they are a part. That means prioritising
the activities and press of the broad formation itself. Half in, half
out, doesn’t work.

* We should put no a priori limits on
the evolution of a broad left formation. Its evolution will be
determined by how it responds to the major questions in the fight
against imperialism and neoliberal capitalism, not by putting a 1930s
label on it (like ‘centrism’).

* The example of the PSoL in Brazil
shows it is perfectly possible to function as a broad socialist party
with several organised militant socialist currents within it. The
precondition of giving organised currents the right to operate within a
broad party is that they do not circumvent the rights of the members
who are not members of organised currents.

The SWP’s ‘democratic centralism’ – national and international

Readers will note that the above series
of considerations is exactly how the SWP did not function in Respect.
It is a commonplace that those who function in factional and
bureaucratic ways in the broader movement generally operate tin pot
regimes at home. There are strong reasons for thinking that the version
of ‘democratic centralism’ operated by the SWP is undemocratic. This is
not just a matter of rules and the constitution, but there are problems
there as well.

* Decision-making in the SWP is
concentrated in an extremely small group of people. The SWP Central
Committee is around12 people, a very small number given the size of the
organisation. Effective decision making is concentrated in three or
four people within that.

* Political minorities are denied
access to the CC. At the January 2006 conference of the SWP long-time
SWP member John Molyneaux put forward a position criticising the line
of the leadership, but his candidacy for the CC was rejected because it
would “add nothing” to CC discussions.

* Tendencies and factions can only
exist during pre-conference periods. This effectively makes them
extremely difficult to organise. In any case, political debates and
issues are not confined the SWP leadership’s internal timetable.

* There is no real internal bulletin
and little internal political discussion outside of pre-conference
period. Real discussion is concentrated at the top.

* As the expulsions of Nick Wrack, Rob
Hoveman and Kevin Ovenden show, the disciplinary procedure is arbitrary
and can be effected by the CC with no due process or hearing in which
the accused can put their case.

In his contribution to the SWP’s pre-conference bulletin John Molyneaux said:

“…the nature of the problem can most
clearly be seen if we look at the outcome of all these meetings,
councils, conferences, elections, etc. The fact is that in the last 15
years perhaps longer) there has not been a single substantial issue on
which the CC has been defeated at a conference or party council or NC.
Indeed I don’t think that in this period there has ever been even a
serious challenge or a close vote. On the contrary, the overwhelming
majority of conference or council sessions have ended with the
virtually unanimous endorsement of whatever is proposed by the
leadership. Similarly, in this period there has never been a contested
election for the CC: ie, not one comrade has ever been proposed or
proposed themselves for the CC other than those nominated by the CC
themselves. It is worth emphasising that such a state of affairs is a
long way from the norm in the history of the socialist movement. It was
not the norm in the Bolshevik Party or the Communist International.
before its Stalinisation. It was not the norm at any point in the
Trotskyist tradition under Trotsky.”

John Molyneaux put all this down to the
nature of the period and the low level of the class struggle in the
1980s and 1990s. It is from obvious that this is true. Its root cause
is the conception of ‘democratic’ centralism that the SWP have.

We could note at this point that the
SWP’s internal regime is the polar opposite of that of a similarly
sized, but much more influential, organisation, the LCR in France,
where the organisation of minorities and their incorporation in the
leadership is normal. In fact the SWP’s supporters in France have gone
into the LCR and form a…permanent faction, Socialism Par en Bas (SPEB)
that would of course be banned inside the SWP itself!

Equally the functioning of the
international tendency that the SWP dominates – the IST – is dominated
by a notion of ‘international democratic centralism’ in which the SWP
takes upon itself the right to boss other ‘sections’ around, down to
the smallest, detailed tactic. This, unsurprisingly, results in splits
with any organisation that develops an autonomous leadership with a
minimum of self-respect. So for example the SWP split on no principled
basis at all with its Greek and US sections in 2003 – expulsions that
were carried out by the Central Committee of the SWP, and only
confirmed as an afterthought by a hastily-summoned meeting of the IST.

There is an irony in all this. Up until
the late 1960s the International Socialists – precursor organisation of
the SWP – maintained a sharp critique of ‘orthodox Trotskyism’, not
least in regard to its organisational methods. IS members tended to see
Leninism as being, at least in part, ‘responsible’ for Stalinism, and
instead counterposed ‘Luxemburgism’ against ‘toy Bolshevism’. After the
May-June events in France, Tony Cliff adopted Leninism and wrote a
three-volume biography of Lenin to justify this. The irony consists in
the fact that the version of Leninism that Cliff adopted became, over
time, clearly marked by the bowdlerised version of Leninism that the IS
originally rejected.

Opposed conceptions of the left

There is a false conception of the
configuration of the workers movement and the left, a misreading of
ideas from the 1930s, that is common in some sections of the Trotskyist
movement. This ‘map’ sees basically the working class and its trade
unions, the reformists (Stalinists), various forms of ‘centrism’
(tendencies which vacillate between reform and revolution) and the
revolutionary marxists – with maybe the anarchists as a complicating
factor. On the basis of this kind of map, Trotsky could say in 1938
“There is no revolutionary tendency worthy of the name on the face of
the earth outside the Fourth International (ie the revolutionary
marxists - ed)”.

If this idea was ever operable, it is
certainly not today. The forms of the emergence of mass anti-capitalism
and rejection of Stalinism and social democracy has thrown up a
cacophony of social movements and social justice organisations, as well
as a huge array of militant left political forces internationally. This
poses new and complex tasks of organising and cohering the
anti-capitalist left. And this cannot be done by building a small
international current that regards itself as the unique depository of
Marxist truth and regards itself as capable of giving the correct
answer on every question, in every part of the planet (in one of its
most caricatured forms, by publishing a paper that looks suspiciously
like Socialist Worker and aping every tactical turn of the British SWP).

The self definition of the Fourth
International and Socialist Resistance is very different to that. We
have our own ideas and political traditions, some of which we see as
essential. But we want to help refound the left, together with others,
incorporating the decisive lessons of feminism and environmentalism, in
a dialogue with other anti-capitalists and militant leftists. One that
doesn’t start by assuming that we are correct about everything,
all-knowing and have nothing to learn, especially from crucial new
revolutionary experiences like the Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela.

Today the ‘thin red line of Bolshevism’
conception of revolutionary politics doesn’t work. This idea often
prioritises formal programmatic agreement, sometimes on arcane or
secondary questions, above the realities of organisation and class
struggle on the ground. And it systematically leads to artificially
counterposing yourself to every other force on the left.

Against this template, the SWP is
Neanderthal, a particular variant of the dogmatic-sectarian
propagandist tradition that has been so dominant in Britain since the
early 20th century. It is time that its members demanded a rethink.

Postscript: ‘Leninism’

In his interview on Leninism
in International Viewpoint, Daniel Bensaid points out that the word
itself emerged only after the death of Lenin, as part of a campaign to
brutally ‘Bolshevise’ the parties of the Comintern – ie subordinate
them to the Soviet leadership.

For us the name, the word, is
unimportant. What is important is to incorporate what is relevant today
in the thinking of great socialist thinkers like Lenin, Trotsky,
Luxemburg and Gramsci. Lenin was far from being a dogmatist on
organisational forms; from him we retain major aspects of his
theoretical conquests on imperialism and national self-determination,
the self-organisation of the working class, the notions of
revolutionary crisis and strategy, and his critique of the bureaucracy
in the workers movement and social democratic reformism.

All these great thinkers were prepared
to change their forms of organisation to suit the circumstances; the
unity of revolutionary tendencies is not guaranteed by organisational
forms, but by programme and a shared vision of the revolutionary
process. Thus we reject the idea that by our ideas about left
regroupment we are ‘abandoning Leninism’, any more than we are
abandoning Trotskyism or what is relevant in the ideas of Rosa
Luxemburg. What we are abandoning, indeed have long abandoned, is the
template method that sees Leninism as a distinct set of unvarying
organisational forms.

We repeat: some of these organisational
forms, including a monopoly of decision-making by a tiny central group
with special privileges (often of secret information and un-minuted
discussion) – came from a beleaguered Trotskyist movement, that
inherited many of its organisational forms wholesale from the
Stalinised Communist International. You can’t understand the Healy
movement without the Communist Party of Great Britain or the French
‘Lambertists’ without the immense pressure of the French Communist
Party. The brutal ‘Leninism’ of the Communist Parties and the
importation of aspects of its practices into the dogmatic-sectarian
Trotskyist organisations we do indeed repudiate.

An earlier version of
this document was prepared by Phil Hearse, on 1 November 2007, for an
internal discussion in Socialist Resistance (SR). A previous ’samizdat’
version of this text was sent around to some comrades. This new
version, which was adopted by the SR steering committee in January 2008
has some important changes.

Socialist Resistance is a Marxist tendency in Respect Renewal (England and Wales)

NOTES

[1]
This is a reference to the American Socialist Workers Party, which
played a central role in the Teamster Rebellion in Minneapolis in 1934.
The US SWP led by James P. Cannon had a massive impact on British
Trotskyism, not least through Cannon’s organisational textbooks The
Struggle for a Proletarian Party and History of American Trotskyism.